The Liberators

The Liberators News — Dec 2019

An overview of our new articles, videos & podcasts, a gift, and much more!

The end of 2019 is approaching. That makes this a good moment to look back and discover what you want to keep, improve, and drop for the new year. In this edition of our newsletter, you find fresh reading, new podcasts, a listing of our upcoming events and we’ve also included a small gift for you!

This newsletter wrapped as a blog post is an experiment. As The Liberators, we dedicate a lot of our time creating content we consider valuable for our community: articles, videos, podcasts, and much more. Although we try to publish new material at such a pace the community has enough time to read/listen/watch it, we can imagine the amount of content is overwhelming.

Therefore, we’re going to experiment with sharing a monthly overview that contains all the content we’ve created. Besides the content, we’ll also share the things that stood out the most for us this month. What are our lessons learned, insights, and new ideas that emerged? It’s a way to show that the content isn’t generated by two robots called Christiaan and Barry, but that we’re real human beings, with all our ups & downs.

If you consider this useful, please ‘like’ this article. Based on the number of likes, and other feedback, we’ll determine the success of this experiment.

“If you consider this article useful, please ‘like’ it. Based on the number of likes, and other feedback, we’ll determine the success of this experiment.”

Our Month in a Nutshell

For the second time this year, we hosted a Professional Scrum with Kanban class together with Daniel Vacanti. By using Liberating Structures, we’ve created a learning experience that allowed the participants to explore how to use Scrum with Kanban in an interactive, collaborative, and experiential way.

The Liberating Structures User Group meetup of this month was hosted by our friends of KPN iTV. The theme was ‘How to use Liberating Structures in smalls groups (max 5 people)?’. Can you even use Liberating Structures with so few people? The answer: yes, definitely! A bit of tweaking might be necessary, but most of the structures remain useful to try.

In the same week, we conducted another Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master II class as well. With participants from Australia, the US, and France, it was a truly international group. During the class, we discussed how the Scrum Master should move from “just” being the facilitator of Scrum Events to having a much bigger impact on the ability of teams and organizations to work empirically.

This week, we hosted the sixth meetup of The Liberators Network. A lot of fun was had. The theme for this meetup was ‘Your Superpowers’. As part of that, we used a Liberating Structure (in development) called ‘Superhero Cakewalk’. Here, people identify their personal superpower as well as the (positive) superpower of a nemesis that blocks them in using their power.

For example, someone picked ‘Chess Master’ as their superpower: being able to see the big picture and many steps into the future. For him, ‘Mr. Nike’ was his nemesis; someone with a very strong just-do-it attitude. Using this structure helped the group reflect on this year, and give & get help with overcoming challenges to better deal with their nemesis in the new year.

Quote of the Month

“The Daily Scrum should be about the work, not about the worker” — Daniel Vacanti

Fresh Reading

The past weeks, we published the following articles:

Decorate a Christmas Tree with Good Memories of 2019. A simple format for your upcoming Sprint Retrospective or Christmas Party to boost morale and build on your successes.
Liberating Structures — an Antidote to Zombie Scrum. In this paper, we describe what Zombie Scrum is about and offer tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.
Navigating Conflict: A Lifetime of Work. In this article, we’ll share 5 big insights that emerged during the workshop “Address the Elephant”.
The Development Team: Just Developers or a Real Team. Software developers are mostly guys, happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola, and pizza into code. Right? Learn more about what developers are really doing in this article by our guest author Peter Goetz.
Reveal insights and paths forward through nonverbal expression with Drawing Together. In this post, we explore how the Liberating Structure ‘Drawing Together’ purposefully uses a very simple visual language to create a level playing field for everyone involved;
Navigating Conflict: A Lifetime of Work: Five Big Insights from the workshop ‘Address the Elephant’. In this post, we reflect on the insights from the workshop on conflict and tension that we hosted with Julie Huffaker, Karen Dawson, and Daniel Steinhoefer;
Move from Either-Or to Both-And Solutions with Integrated~Autonomy. In this post, we explore how this Liberating Structure helps teams discover how to find solutions that address the needs of both sides in a seemingly paradoxical challenge or conflict;
A photo impression of the workshop ‘Address the Elephant’ and one of the Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop in November by guest author & photographer Lisanne Lentink;

The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide

Together with Johannes Schartau, we’re currently writing the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. We are fortunate to be partnering with Addison-Wesley and Scrum.org to release this handbook for the aspiring Zombie Scrum fighter in Q4 of 2020.

Of course, writing this book is done incrementally. This means we’ll publish parts of the book throughout next year, with the goal of gathering feedback on our increments and improve the book even further. This month, we finished the first two chapters of the book: ‘Getting Started’ and ‘Build What Stakeholders Need’. Parts of these chapters will be published as blog posts in the upcoming period.

In the article ‘The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’ you can read more about our ideas and how you can support us.

The Zombie Scrum Resistance at work (or pretending very much to be)

A gift for 2020: Ignite your Scrum Team!

Make 2020 the year where you unleash your Scrum Team by delivering 100% Done Software every single Sprint. If there’s one thing we really want to do in the new year, it is helping more teams do this.

We invite you to join us on February 12 in Amsterdam with your team (or representatives) for a workshop designed to help you overcome the hard technical and organizational challenges that are getting in your way. We’re bringing together teams from many different organizations to learn from each other, discover novel solutions and build networks.

Sign up or read more about this event here. Use the code CHRISTMASGIFT for a nice discount that applies until January 10, 2020.

A workshop that will take place on February 12, in Amsterdam

New Podcast Episodes

The past period, we recorded the following new episodes for our podcast:

For more episodes, follow us on Buzzsprout. You can also find us under ‘The Liberators Network’ on Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, iHeart Radio and many other platforms.

New Video Material

We’ve created a bunch of short videos to offer an impression of what our workshops & events are about:

The Professional Scrum Master II class on December 12 & 13. In this Christmas-edition, we explored the values & principles behind the Scrum Framework with 16 participants, and how they help make decisions about what to spend time on.
The Professional Scrum with Kanban class on December 3 & 4. Where the Scrum Framework focuses on what is necessary to work empirically, Kanban helps do that work in the most effective way. And in a way that encourages predictability, but not through traditional estimation-based means. A very useful, powerful and insightful class for every experienced Scrum practitioner.
The Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop on November 19 & 20. Together with a Design Team of Karen Dawson, Julie Huffaker, Maryse Meinen, Harry Nieboer, we offered 80 participants the opportunity to experience over 20 Liberating Structures.
The Liberating Structures Meetup on November 11. What if we would ask groups to design their upcoming interaction with a string of Liberating Structures?

Another video we’ve created is with Daniel Vacanti. In this video, we talk about the ‘Professional Scrum With Kanban’-class, and how it is relevant to Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Scrum Teams in general.

Scrum is a lightweight framework for solving complex problems. It offers a few rules, events and roles but leaves the ‘How’ mostly to teams. Kanban is a great way to help Scrum Teams optimize their flow within a Sprint and deliver value sooner. Although — and the participants always experience this — Kanban shows that this requires things that feel very counter-intuitive. Like limiting work in progress and working on less.

So What’s Next?

The upcoming weeks will be a mixture of enjoying the Christmas period and New Year's Eve with friends & family and continue creating new content.

Our first workshop will be the Scrum.org Steward F2F in Amsterdam. Together with 30 ‘stewards’ and Scrum.org staff, we’ll share ideas and create new material that will improve the classes and related Scrum learning journeys.

In January we’ll have our second “heidag” (or: annual corporate technical tactical retreat). “Heidag” is a word that makes most people in the Netherlands cringe. What started as a way to take your team outside and talk about important stuff, like strategy and collaboration, turned into something that most people associate with doing all sorts of weird activities for the sake of ‘teambuilding’. Proving that The Liberators is a real company, we’re going to do it again in January. Of course, in an interactive, fun, and valuable manner. Check this video for an impression of the previous edition.

Good to know: two new workshops will be announced very soon. We’re ‘almost done’ setting up the registration page via Eventbrite. One workshop is about Zombie Scrum. We’ve completely redesigned its predecessor and included lots of new material & exercises that will help you prevent and fix Zombie Scrum.

“Good to know: two new workshops will be announced very soon!”

The second new workshop is related to our most successful series of blog posts: The Scrum Mythbusters! During the workshop, we’ll explore the most common myths and misunderstandings of the Scrum Framework. If you enjoyed our articles, you’ll definitely enjoy this workshop as well! Stay tuned, more information will follow soon.